I am not sure I see your problem.

Hiding sets up an opposed contest between the person who is hiding's Stealth and the person who is looking's Alertness or Investigation. If it is easy to hide say because there is a lot of cover and shadows and what not the person who is hiding gets a bonus to his Stealth roll, and the person who is looking has to roll his Alertness or Investigation and beat that the number rolled plus the environmental difficulty modifier in order to find them.

If the situation is reversed and the environment is very hard to hide in due to it being brightly lit with no cover then the person who is looking gets the environmental difficulty modifier bonus to his roll on Alertness or Investigation and the person who is hiding still sets the difficulty to be found using his Stealth skill.

Since a Stealth roll is always an opposed roll against an opponent's Alertness or Investigation roll you give the environmental difficulty to whomever would get the benefit of the environmental difficulty modifier on their roll and therefore make it more difficult for his opponent.

So hiding in a dark environment with lots of cover has an environmental bonus of +3 to hide. Hider rolls his Stealth skill +4DF +3 points environmental bonus vs the Looker who rolls his Alertness or Investigation skill +4DF and see who is the winner.

Spotting someone in a brightly lit environment without any cover has an environmental bonus of +3 to spot. Hider rolls his Stealth skill +4DF vs the Looker who rolls his Alertness or Investigation skill +4DF +3 points environmental bonus and see who is the winner.

In both situations the environmental difficulty modifier makes it more difficult for whoever would have difficulty on their roll due to the environmental difficulty modifier.

The problem is they've been misreading "the roll" to mean only what you rolled on the 4df rather than roll+modifiers(stealth+environment+etc...).  I was going to comment on it a while back but I didn't feel like getting pedantic'd to death.

I don't actually advocate the use of characters like this outside of examples.

And I question the validity of that maneuver. (EDIT: Plus, a heat beam requires no oxygen and is just as lethal as a fireball.)

But it is winning a fight to trap your opponent in a hole. If you want, you can come back the next morning when he's human and shoot him. Or just let the dirt suffocate him when he's human again.

I wonder if the latter method is Lawbreaking.

The limits of elements have been debated to death. But let me point out that the character in this example actually evokes two other elements to the tune of 5 shifts, maybe more. He's hardly helpless when not using his specialty.

A fire-using channeler is worse at using fire than a fire-using evoker, by the way. The only exceptions are

a) if he focuses entirely on offensive or defensive evocation, he can outdo the evoker very slightly at it at the cost of being rather bad at the other type.

and

b) when there is very little refresh available to spend.

And finally, I challenge you to find a situation where Spirit evocations are useless. That element does basically everything. It kinda bugs me.

In hindsight, that came off a bit crabbier than I intended, my bad and my apologies.  I still wouldn't say dropping a loup-garou in a hole is winning though, filled or not.  It's highly unlikely to still be there in the morning unless you sat there and made sure it stayed in.  Which would cost a <i>lot</i> more stress points.

And I'm not saying some specialization is bad but thinking one element is the cure to all your casting woes is badly misguided.  I'm talking player as well as character here.  I personally don't care if they want to stick all their extra refresh towards earth refinement but they'd absolutely better be in the right frame of mind to prove why a wizard is not just more powerful but just plain more than a FP.  If they refuse to take a clue it's quickly going to become obvious to other players that they're a really lousy wizard and I'm going to get terribly bored GMing them if I have to constantly think "is this otherwise easy situation going to end up killing everyone because earth magic can't handle it?"

Spirit's the trickiest of the bunch, no doubt, but it's still plenty vulnerable.  Its shields are the de facto standard but (unless they're a veil rather than a shield) they almost never stop light (such as Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) and probably don't stop air, heat, or massive electrical discharge.  They definitely don't help when The Building Is On Fire.  They can't keep you from becoming Magically Grounded by the running water from a nearby burst pipe/fire hydrant.  There's not much spirit can do to directly counter increased or decreased gravity.

Guess what I'm saying is it's fine to have a favorite element and let it develop into a signature style but if your use of the other elements sucks (either because of over specialization or just your thinking) then you should have just rolled a FP and gotten the extra refresh.

First: I need to find a copy of the book "Even Hand" is from and cannot do so.  What is the title?

Second: Free Will is easy.  All it requires is positive refresh. By that same token, if you let a player pick up the role of a fae or black court vampire...for game purposes (cannon notwithstanding) you just gave it free will.  We can wax philosophical about it all day, but in the end...according to the system it is as easy as that.

Yeah, "because I said so and I'm the GM" works for pretty much everything but snaking someone's beer.

I suggest earning your money the really old fashion way and inherit it.

I thought the really old fashioned way was kill other people and take theirs.

Nope.  It's great for infiltration and escape, but pretty worthless for actually harming anyone.  He who fights and runs away, lives but doesn't accomplish much else.

Well, he gets to say "Meep meep!" and make me spit coffee everywhere.

In my none too humble, PDF-programmer-for-15-years-so-I'm-more-than-a-tad-biased opinion...

Conviction Great (+4)
Using Reads e-Manuals/Books Daily stunt for +2 to PDF related Conviction rolls
Dropping a fate point to invoke Grep FTW aspect for a further +2
Brandishing my holy ELF binary of vim at you
+1 on the fudge dice

Heh, I usually build the character sheet to the character I think I want to play first.  Then I write the Background phase and name him/her.  Then I go back and rework about half of the skills/stunts/powers.  Repeat for Rising Conflict and The Story but don't change anything on the character sheet that would require a rework of anything on the phases sheet.  By the time I get to Guest Star 1/2 I forbid myself from changing anything until I play them.

It works for me because I get to let stats and story influence each other but I limit myself enough that I'm not there for days trying to get it perfect.  Most of it can be tweaked enough to suit me in a milestone or three even if it doesn't at the start of play.

I know that mechanically/technically the line between Free Will and Monster lies at about 0 Refresh, simply put. But would you say that the Merlin, as powerful as he is, perhaps is also more a 'creature' bound by what he is, as opposed to who? I am not taking into account that he is very old and is set in his ways or something, but more as a musing.

Another example: is Ebenezer McCoy, at his age, more defined by his free will or by his role in the White Council? I know it isn't the same as a negative refresh 'monster' like Mab or a vampire, but I was just wondering how you figure this one

As many Major Milestones as those two have had, they probably have a base refresh of at least 30.  The Merlin is likely skirting around as close to 0 as he can get without crossing it.  I say that based on his supreme lack of doing anything out of character unless absolutely forced.  McCoy probably has at least 4 to spare.